


Reflections on a Memoir

by sonoflight



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Extra-Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 08:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18587581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonoflight/pseuds/sonoflight
Summary: Each sibling's reaction to the canon excerpts from Vanya's autobiography, as seen in the The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite #2





	1. 00.01 - Spaceboy

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone! I'm back at again with writing new fics, apparently. This is a short one, but I just wanted to give voice to everyone's immediate thoughts upon reading Vanya's book. The beginning quotes of each chapter are straight from the comics, except I altered Five's to better fit with the show. If you watch 1.03 of the show, this is all basically canon compliant. Enjoy!

_“Arrogant and self-centered, Luther cares more about being a hero than anything else. It’s certainly more important to him than his family.”_

~

If Luther’s hands weren’t already occupied holding up his weight as he does pushups, he’d be throwing Vanya's book across the room. He regrets buying it in the first place. He’d bought it to be supportive of her since she’s his sister, but every word about him paints him as such a terrible person. A drop of sweat falls down from his cheek to the page, smudging the word _hero_ into an illegible stain on the crisp paper.

He can’t believe she thinks he wanted to be a hero more than a brother. It just isn’t true—it’s slander.

Yes, he’s always wanted to be the hero Dad expected of him, but he did it _for_ his family, not in spite of them, because they’re important to him. How could Vanya accuse him of prioritizing glory over team?

Another drop falls, this time onto his name.

He’s no saint, but he’s not the words glaring up at him either. _Arrogant. Self-centered._ That is not who he is.

More sweat hits the page. Good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	2. 00.02 - The Kraken

_“Diego’s independence has always put him at odds with Father and the other siblings. I admire it, though, and while we’ve drifted apart, he’s the only one I can really say I love as a brother.”_

~

That one snippet of kindness should make Diego feel better about the rest of what Vanya has to say about him. It should make him happy to know that Vanya loves him. To know that not everyone in his family hates him for his need to be his own person.

But it doesn’t.

Because even her love for him didn’t stop her from writing the rest. That feels worse than anything Reginald ever said to put him down and place him below Luther. At least Reginald hadn’t bothered to hide his distaste for Diego behind nice little illusions of love. If Vanya really cared, she’d have made an effort to stay in touch, maybe hear what Diego had to say for himself about his own childhood.

He rips the back cover off and tosses the rest of the book into the trash. On his way to his punching bag, he grabs a roll of tape and pulls off a long strip. He wraps the strip all the way around the bag, the top edge of the book cover wedged underneath. Vanya’s face and her glowing reviews stare back at him. That’s not love. He takes a swing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	3. 00.03 - The Rumor

_“My sister is beautiful, and she knows it. Allison loves attention, even while complaining about it, feigning modesty. What else would you expect—her superpower is dishonesty. Father trained her so well.”_

~

Allison swears her heart stops for a moment when she reaches her chapter. She hadn’t expected so much venom out of Vanya. For those to be the first thing Vanya has to say about her is like being punched in the gut.

She leans forward to look closer, praying that the words will rearrange and morph into something less bitter, less resentful. Allison’s stylist huffs and turns to reach for makeup remover to fix the damage Allison’s done to her work.

Allison wants to be angry with Vanya. That would be so much easier to handle than the guilt creeping up her spine because Vanya isn’t Allison—she doesn’t put lies out into the world. Maybe somewhere in her heart, Allison’s always known these things to be true of herself, but she’d never meant to make Vanya hate her like this.

Unable to read any further, she closes the book and sits back, letting her stylist fix her eyeliner. She wishes she could go back and be a better sister. She wishes she could rumor herself into being a better person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	4. 00.04 – The Séance

_“Klaus was so sweet and vulnerable as a boy, but Father experimented on him the most, and it changed him. He became cruel as a teenager—even worse, the older he gets.”_

~

So Klaus may have nicked Vanya’s autobiography from a local bookstore, and he may have brought it with him to this stupid AA meeting that he’s required to be at. Whatever. It’s not as if he was gonna pay attention anyway—it’s just the same circle of sorry souls and their need to overshare as always.

Reading Vanya’s accounts of Luther, Diego, and Allison had been delightful. He’s certain their reactions were priceless—angry, angrier, and guilty. Just like always.

His mood is ruined by the words about him, though. Surely, Vanya’s mistaken him for someone else, some stranger. Yeah, Reggie was a prick with too much free time to watch his own son claw his nails off against the mausoleum walls, but that hadn’t changed Klaus _that_ much… had it?

He tries to think back to who he was as a teenager, but he comes up more or less empty. Honestly, he was too high for those years to be much more than a blur of fuzzy impressions. Right up until the day Ben died. He remembers that.

Oh well. With a small shrug, he skips the rest of his chapter and moves on to Five’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	5. 00.05

_“He disappeared when we were only thirteen years old. He rejected the names we were given, so I don’t know even what to call him. I envy him, having checked out of this family so long ago.”_

~

After he’d buried his family, Five had wandered the streets that used to be his city. He’d met Delores, scrounged up some essentials, and now he finds himself in the library. It makes sense. This has always been his comfort spot when things at home get too heated, and he needs comfort now more than ever. Plus, there might be some answers or resources here that he can use.

He hadn’t really been surprised to find that Vanya had written a book about the family. If anyone was going to, it was going to be her. It’s quite good, if not a little callous, and unless things at home had changed after Five left, it’s dead accurate.

Well, except for the fact that Vanya envies Five. That’s one thing that Vanya most certainly got wrong. Five wishes he could somehow tell her that she shouldn’t want to let go, that she should cherish her time with the family because soon enough, they’ll all be gone, and Five won’t even be able to recover her body so she can be buried with everyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	6. 00.06 - The Horror

_“The kindest of my siblings, but he was so eager to please Father. He was easily manipulated, dragged into Father and Luther’s little games—and those two simply let him die.”_

~

Ben gapes. “Oh my god. She wrote that? I can’t believe she would do that.”

Klaus shushes him and goes back to reading, but Ben needs a second to process what he’s just read. Vanya should’ve known better than all of them why he needed Dad to be pleased with him. She’s the one he’d confided in whenever Dad had taken him to that secret room and forced him to use his powers.

And how could she say that about Luther? It wasn’t his fault that Ben had lost control of his powers anymore than it was his fault that Dad had worked Ben too hard the night before he died.

She wasn’t there either, when the end came. Luther was the one who pressed his hands to Ben’s wounds and tried to save him, not her. And it was Luther who carried his body home. Vanya didn’t see him until Luther came home alone, and—

Oh. She didn’t know. Ben closes his eyes, feeling nauseous in sympathy for what Vanya must’ve seen—Luther, cradling Ben’s bloody body, unable to look anyone in the eye as he dutifully followed Dad down into the basement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


	7. 00.07 - Vanya Hargreeves

_“I was never made to feel a part of the team, much less the family, and was just happy to be sent off to school.”_

~

The accounts about her siblings came easy to Vanya. Years of unspoken words and buried feelings had bubbled up with little resistance, practically typing themselves. She could write about Luther’s arrogance, and Diego’s rebellion, Allison’s vanity and Klaus’ heartlessness. She could write about missing Five and Ben.

But now that she has to write about herself, small and forgotten Number Seven, she’s at a loss. She stares hard at the single sentence she’s written, and she wishes she had something else to put after it.

That can’t be all there is to say about who she is. She’s not just defined by what she wasn’t. It feels that way, though. In the face of how interesting the rest of her family is, she has frustratingly little to offer the world. So what—she can write a good story and play the violin? What’s that compared to the ability to warp reality and summon the dead? It’s nothing. She’s nothing.

She’s just ordinary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta-da! This the fastest I've ever finished a multi-chapter work. Shhhh I know it's cheating when each chapter is less than 200 words but still. Anywho, thank you all for giving this your time, I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it! Kudos and comments are always loved and cherished, and you can catch me on tumblr [@lastoftherealblues](http://lastoftherealblues.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
